People in H&S: Clancy Houghton "..as soon as possible";

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PEOPLE IN H&S Clancy Houghton
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included in Web
version
'My undergraduate days were no great
shakes, believe me. I was carrying a very
heavy load and squeezed three years'
work into a year and a half. And with all
the things I did to earn money, I never
had any time of my own. But when you
realize that you don't have any time to
waste you learn to make every minute
count."
Today H&S partner Clarence W.
Houghton can stretch his lean, six-five
frame across his bright corner office on
the twentieth floor of the Wells Fargo
Building overlooking San Francisco's
financial district, and laugh as he reflects
on his struggle to make ends meet while
supporting a young family and earning
a degree at the University of California
at Berkeley.
Although he seems so much at home in
colorful and exciting San Francisco with
its NOW people, Clancy Houghton was
born thousands of miles away and thirty-seven
years ago, in Walpole, New
Hampshire, a village of about 300 people.
His father was a dentist there.
As a junior in high school, and a star on
the basketball team that was runner-up
in the state championship two years in a
row, Clancy met Ritva Pajunen, the
daughter of a lumbermill owner, newly
arrived from Finland. Within a short
time, "Rit" became the main reason
Clancy decided his future was to be in
the West.
Just as it had for several previous owners,
the lumbermill went bankrupt and Rit's
parents moved to California, with the
agreement that she would finish high
school and then follow. Clancy, in the
meantime, had applied to all the Ivy
League schools... and the University of
Southern California. As fortune would
have it, USC was the first to respond.
"They said, 'Yeah, come on out,' " Clancy
recalls. "So four days after high school
graduation I left for California, But I
guess you would say the decision to go to
California wasn't entirely objective.
There was some emotion involved."
During Clancy's freshman year at USC,
his father had a stroke and Clancy saw
that he would have to put himself through
school. So, knowing that he would have
to go into military service anyway and
wanting to take advantage of the GI Bill
of Rights for his education, Clancy
decided to join the Air Force. But first,
at nineteen, he married his high school
sweetheart, and Clancy and Rit began
their odyssey of Air Force bases, a
journey that was to bring an ambitious
young man face to face with the
accounting profession.
"We really moved around," Clancy recalls.
"First to upper New York state, and then
Texas. I took the accounting specialist
course in Texas. We were told that the
men who finished the highest in the
course would get to choose their next
assignment, and at that time the Air Force
was sending people either to Korea or
Thule, Greenland. I worked hard and
managed to get assigned to a base in
Fairfield, California, about 50 miles
north of San Francisco. After a year there
I went to Britain... to a base in Sealand,
North Wales, that was in the process of
being closed. A lot of the officers had
already transferred out. One of those
transferred was the budget officer.
"I had spent about two weeks there when
the controller asked if I had ever worked
on budgets. I told him that I had once
helped in the preparation of one but that
most of my part was in preparing specific
schedules that someone else requested.
He indicated that relative to the other
people on base, that made me the expert
and I was made an instant budget officer.
I got a copy of the Air Force manual on
budgeting and read it at night. What I
would read at night, I'd do the next day
Although my first budget was reasonably
successful I was only an airman first and
the budget officer was supposed to be a
captain. That didn't look very good to the
brass, so they promoted me to staff
sergeant.
"When the base finally closed a year later,
we moved to Burt on wood Air Force Base
in Lancashire, where I was the NCO in
charge of all property accounting, with
about thirty people on my staff. I was
introduced to computers while I was
there. The Air Force was installing the
first business computer in Europe and
one of my jobs was to implement a
computerized inventory control system."
With such experience behind him, and a
young family to support ("Wendv was
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